BoXHED2.0: Scalable boosting of dynamic survival analysis

Modern applications of survival analysis increasingly involve time-dependent covariates. In healthcare settings, such covariates provide dynamic patient histories that can be used to assess health risks in realtime by tracking the hazard function. Hazard learning is thus particularly useful in healthcare analytics, and the open-source package BoXHED 1.0 provides the first implementation of a gradient boosted hazard estimator that is fully nonparametric. This paper introduces BoXHED 2.0, a quantum leap over BoXHED 1.0 in several ways. Crucially, BoXHED 2.0 can deal with survival data that goes far beyond right-censoring and it also supports recurring events. To our knowledge, this is the only nonparametric machine learning implementation that is able to do so. Another major improvement is that BoXHED 2.0 is orders of magnitude more scalable, due in part to a novel data preprocessing step that sidesteps the need for explicit quadrature when dealing with time-dependent covariates. BoXHED 2.0 supports the use of GPUs and multicore CPUs, and is available from GitHub: www.github.com/BoXHED.Comment: 12 page

Self-supervised contrastive learning of echocardiogram videos enables label-efficient cardiac disease diagnosis

Advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) have shown that self-supervised pretraining on medical imaging data can provide a strong initialization for downstream supervised classification and segmentation. Given the difficulty of obtaining expert labels for medical image recognition tasks, such an "in-domain" SSL initialization is often desirable due to its improved label efficiency over standard transfer learning. However, most efforts toward SSL of medical imaging data are not adapted to video-based medical imaging modalities. With this progress in mind, we developed a self-supervised contrastive learning approach, EchoCLR, catered to echocardiogram videos with the goal of learning strong representations for efficient fine-tuning on downstream cardiac disease diagnosis. EchoCLR leverages (i) distinct videos of the same patient as positive pairs for contrastive learning and (ii) a frame re-ordering pretext task to enforce temporal coherence. When fine-tuned on small portions of labeled data (as few as 51 exams), EchoCLR pretraining significantly improved classification performance for left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) and aortic stenosis (AS) over other transfer learning and SSL approaches across internal and external test sets. For example, when fine-tuning on 10% of available training data (519 studies), an EchoCLR-pretrained model achieved 0.72 AUROC (95% CI: [0.69, 0.75]) on LVH classification, compared to 0.61 AUROC (95% CI: [0.57, 0.64]) with a standard transfer learning approach. Similarly, using 1% of available training data (53 studies), EchoCLR pretraining achieved 0.82 AUROC (95% CI: [0.79, 0.84]) on severe AS classification, compared to 0.61 AUROC (95% CI: [0.58, 0.65]) with transfer learning. EchoCLR is unique in its ability to learn representations of medical videos and demonstrates that SSL can enable label-efficient disease classification from small, labeled datasets

Use of mechanical circulatory support devices among patients with acute myocardial infarction complicated by cardiogenic shock

Importance: Mechanical circulatory support (MCS) devices, including intravascular microaxial left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) and intra-aortic balloon pumps (IABPs), are used in patients who undergo percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) complicated by cardiogenic shock despite limited evidence of their clinical benefit. Objective: To examine trends in the use of MCS devices among patients who underwent PCI for AMI with cardiogenic shock, hospital-level use variation, and factors associated with use. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional study used the CathPCI and Chest Pain-MI Registries of the American College of Cardiology National Cardiovascular Data Registry. Patients who underwent PCI for AMI complicated by cardiogenic shock between October 1, 2015, and December 31, 2017, were identified from both registries. Data were analyzed from October 2018 to August 2020. Exposures: Therapies to provide hemodynamic support were categorized as intravascular microaxial LVAD, IABP, TandemHeart, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, LVAD, other devices, combined IABP and intravascular microaxial LVAD, combined IABP and other device (defined as TandemHeart, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, LVAD, or another MCS device), or medical therapy only. Main Outcomes and Measures: Use of MCS devices overall and specific MCS devices, including intravascular microaxial LVAD, at both patient and hospital levels and variables associated with use. Results: Among the 28 304 patients included in the study, the mean (SD) age was 65.4 (12.6) years and 18 968 were men (67.0%). The overall MCS device use was constant from the fourth quarter of 2015 to the fourth quarter of 2017, although use of intravascular microaxial LVADs significantly increased (from 4.1% to 9.8%; P \u3c .001), whereas use of IABPs significantly decreased (from 34.8% to 30.0%; P \u3c .001). A significant hospital-level variation in MCS device use was found. The median (interquartile range [IQR]) proportion of patients who received MCS devices was 42% (30%-54%), and the median proportion of patients who received intravascular microaxial LVADs was 1% (0%-10%). In multivariable analyses, cardiac arrest at first medical contact or during hospitalization (odds ratio [OR], 1.82; 95% CI, 1.58-2.09) and severe left main and/or proximal left anterior descending coronary artery stenosis (OR, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.20-1.54) were patient characteristics that were associated with higher odds of receiving intravascular microaxial LVADs only compared with IABPs only. Conclusions and Relevance: This study found that, among patients who underwent PCI for AMI complicated by cardiogenic shock, overall use of MCS devices was constant, and a 2.5-fold increase in intravascular microaxial LVAD use was found along with a corresponding decrease in IABP use and a significant hospital-level variation in MCS device use. These trends were observed despite limited clinical trial evidence of improved outcomes associated with device use

Automated Diet Capture Using Voice Alerts and Speech Recognition on Smartphones: Pilot Usability and Acceptability Study

BackgroundEffective monitoring of dietary habits is critical for promoting healthy lifestyles and preventing or delaying the onset and progression of diet-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. Recent advances in speech recognition technologies and natural language processing present new possibilities for automated diet capture; however, further exploration is necessary to assess the usability and acceptability of such technologies for diet logging. ObjectiveThis study explores the usability and acceptability of speech recognition technologies and natural language processing for automated diet logging. MethodsWe designed and developed base2Diet—an iOS smartphone application that prompts users to log their food intake using voice or text. To compare the effectiveness of the 2 diet logging modes, we conducted a 28-day pilot study with 2 arms and 2 phases. A total of 18 participants were included in the study, with 9 participants in each arm (text: n=9, voice: n=9). During phase I of the study, all 18 participants received reminders for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at preselected times. At the beginning of phase II, all participants were given the option to choose 3 times during the day to receive 3 times daily reminders to log their food intake for the remainder of the phase, with the ability to modify the selected times at any point before the end of the study. ResultsThe total number of distinct diet logging events per participant was 1.7 times higher in the voice arm than in the text arm (P=.03, unpaired t test). Similarly, the total number of active days per participant was 1.5 times higher in the voice arm than in the text arm (P=.04, unpaired t test). Furthermore, the text arm had a higher attrition rate than the voice arm, with only 1 participant dropping out of the study in the voice arm, while 5 participants dropped out in the text arm. ConclusionsThe results of this pilot study demonstrate the potential of voice technologies in automated diet capturing using smartphones. Our findings suggest that voice-based diet logging is more effective and better received by users compared to traditional text-based methods, underscoring the need for further research in this area. These insights carry significant implications for the development of more effective and accessible tools for monitoring dietary habits and promoting healthy lifestyle choices

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